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“Oxford has arguably contributed more to our understanding of tribal societies than any other department of anthropology in the world…Through creating a virtual community, by uniting their work and their lives, by their assurance, generations of Oxford scholars have been able to make the leaps which take us into new and previously unsuspected worlds. They had the privileges, the shared zeal and the shock of similarity-with-difference which engenders true creativity and they made good use of it.” · [from the Preface] “[The volume’s] virtues include giving outsiders a sense of Oxford anthropology’s oral tradition.” · JRAI “There is no doubt that Oxford has been a leading player in the discipline of anthropology. It is precisely the fact that this resounding success can be taken for granted that makes possible this deliciously indiscreet retrospective.” · Books & Culture

Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all \"primitive\" cultures with \"Primitive Fetishism,\" a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world—thunderstorms, trees, stones—is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby \"fetishizing\" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.

The article sets out to understand the misconceptions and misrepresentations of religion in general and African religion in particular and how these fallacies have affected the latter since they entered the global scene. This also drives us to historicise religious discourses and eventually consider how its apologists and/or scholars of religion have responded since the first half of the 20th century. Have the African indigenous resources contributed positively in enriching Christianity and in building a theologia africana, and is the ‘poverty of Western Religious Experience’ the main factor that fuels the misunderstandings and falsifications? As part of the 50th commemoration of research in theology and religion, particularly through the Research Institute for Theology and Religion (RITR) at the University of South Africa (1975–2025), it strives to account for the scholarly developments that have triggered a paradigm shift, a phenomenon where the Gospel and Africa’s religio-culture are engaged in a dialogue of purpose that strives to offer authentic Christianity in Africa amid critics of such initiatives. It is conceptually informed by Cornelius Willem du Toit’s contrast between the ‘poverty of western religious experiences’ and African spirituality.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implicationsThrough its theo-historical-analytical design, this research article adds value to our knowledge of (South) African religion and the interdisciplinary world of academia by drawing its theoretical framework from the multidisciplinary works of Professor Cornel du Toit. It demonstrates RITR’s works, in the last 50 years (1975–2025), as an interdisciplinary enterprise that seeks to effectively address contemporary African concerns.

Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832–1917) Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, one of the most important books in the history of anthropology, was published in two volumes in 1871. The Polish translation, published between 1896 and 1898 (t. 1–2) was based on the third, revised English version (vol. 1–2: 1891). It was made by Zofia Antonina Kowerska (1871–1946) and published under the title Cywilizacja pierwotna; badania rozwoju mitologji, filozofji, wiary, mowy, sztuki i zwyczajów. Jan Aleksander Karłowicz (1836–1903) was responsible for the realisation of the project. Actualising in the linguistic and cultural context, Tylor’s terminology became one of the fundaments of cultural theory reflection. In this paper I explore the problem of translation of chosen terms introduced by Tylor, namely survival and revival. The former (Polish: przeżytek) proved crucial for the evolutionistic thought and it is directly associated with it. As for the latter, however, modern Polish readers of Tylor’s writings, as well as the authors of textbooks on the history of cultural sciences, fail to notice its terminological character. On the basis of a comparative analysis of excerpts from Primitive Culture and Cywilizacja pierwotna, I argue that the word revival has only been terminologized on the English academic ground (being complementary to the term survival), while in Polish tradition/Polish ground it has failed to become part of specialist language and has ultimately fallen into oblivion.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is often considered the father of the discipline of anthropology. Despite such eminence, his biography has never been written and the connections between his life and his work have been largely obscured or ignored. This article presents Tylor's main theories in the field of anthropology, especially as presented in his four published books, the most famous of which is Primitive Culture, and in the manuscript sources for his last, unpublished, one on ‘The natural history of religion’. One of Tylor's major areas of interest was the use of anthropological evidence to discover how religion arose. This preoccupation resulted in his influential account of ‘animism’. Drawing upon biographical information not known by previous scholars, Tylor's Quaker formation, later religious scepticism and personal life are connected to his intellectual work. Assumptions such as his evolutionary view of human culture and intellectualist approach to ‘savage’ customs, his use of the comparative method, and distinctive notions of his such as ‘survivals’ are first explained, and then the discussion is taken a step further in order to demonstrate how they were deployed to influence contemporary religious beliefs and practices. Tylor argued that the discipline of anthropology was a ‘reformer's science’. Working within the warfare model of the relationship between faith and science, I reveal the extent to which this meant for him using the tools of this new field of inquiry to bring about changes in the religious convictions of his contemporaries.

Culture, 1922traces the intellectual and institutional deployment of the culture concept in England and America in the first half of the twentieth century. With primary attention to how models of culture are created, elaborated upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored, Marc Manganaro works across disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary critical, and anthropological writing. Tracing two traditions of thinking about culture, as elite products and pursuits and as common and shared systems of values, Manganaro argues that these modernist formulations are not mutually exclusive and have indeed intermingled in complex and interesting ways throughout the development of literary studies and anthropology. Beginning with the important Victorian architects of culture--Matthew Arnold and Edward Tylor--the book follows a number of main figures, schools, and movements up to 1950 such as anthropologist Franz Boas, his disciples Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, literary modernists T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, functional anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, modernist literary critic I. A. Richards, the New Critics, and Kenneth Burke. The main focus here, however, is upon three works published in 1922, the watershed year of Modernism--Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Malinowski'sArgonauts of the Western Pacific, and Joyce'sUlysses. Manganaro reads these masterworks and the history of their reception as efforts toward defining culture. This is a wide-ranging and ambitious study about an ambiguous and complex concept as it moves within and between disciplines.

A survey of articles published in the American Anthropologist over a 100-year period indicates that substantive collaboration across anthropological subfields is largely a myth - amounting to only 311 of 3,264 articles surveyed (or 9.5 percent of the total). Working with the anthropological insights of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Tylor, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this article considers why a myth of subfield collaboration nonetheless exists within anthropology. This article concludes by calling for new forms of holism.

The basic analytical unit used by E. B. Tylor, Franz Boas, Clark Wissler, A. L. Kroeber, and other early anthropologists interested in cultural transmission was the cultural trait. Most assumed that such traits were, at base, mental phenomena acquired through teaching and learning. The lack of an explicit theoretical concept of cultural trait meant that the units varied greatly in scale, generality, and inclusiveness among ethnographers. Efforts to resolve the difficulties of classification and scale were made but were largely unsuccessful. The history of the concept of cultural trait reveals not only the roots of modern theoretical difficulties with units of cultural transmission but also some of the properties that such a unit needs to have if it is to be analytically useful to theories of cultural evolution.

Here I look at E.B. Tylor's classic work Primitive culture, particularly that aspect that deals with animism. I discuss several of the critiques of animism, showing how most of them have actually misread Tylor's original intentions in relation to his supposed `theory of origins' and his understanding of `spirit', among other things. Then, by focusing on Tylor's theory of myth and the process by which he constructs his argument concerning animism, I provide a re-reading that focuses on discourse and layers of religious practice within individual societies. Finally, I indicate how this re-reading of Tylor relates to contemporary writing on animism and modern religions.